Ross Douthat did an elegant job, I thought, being sensitive to the particulars of his colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates' complicated family situation, while not backing down from the truth that there's a reason why the traditional family norms are important to uphold. Ross:
On the one hand, what he's getting at here is precisely the thing that a lot of socially-conservative rhetoric is deaf to - which is not just the extent to which the post-nuclear family society is already here, but the extent to which, for an lot of people in this enormous country of ours, it basically seems to work. One man's "dysfunctional family" is another man's, well, family ...[snip]
But on the other hand, the generalizations matter too. The "artifice" of the traditional family isn't just an artifice, and the values that social conservatives hold so dear - monogamy, marriage vows, the idea that every kid deserves a mother and a father in his life - don't just exist to make people in non-traditional families feel bad about themselves. In the aggregate, Dan Quayle was right. In the aggregate, marriage is better for kids than single parenthood. In the aggregate, marriage is better for men and women than long-term cohabitation. In the aggregate, divorce is bad news - for your finances, your health, and your children's long-term prospects. And in the aggregate, if you're concerned about income inequality or social mobility or the crime rate or just about any area of socioeconomic concern, then you should be at least moderately fretful about the long, slow decline of the American two-parent family - among blacks, whites, and Hispanics alike.
As Ross points out, these private decisions have public consequences. Relationships that produce children are never strictly private matters. This is not to say that every traditional family arrangement will turn out okay, and every non-traditional one will fail. All of us know kids, or maybe are kids, who came from a "Leave It to Beaver" family, but massively screwed up, or who came from a massively screwed-up family, but turned out OK. Still, anecdotes are one thing; data are another. Fatherlessness is a big deal. And there's no way that a family like Ta-Nehisi's ("My Dad has seven kids by four women...") can or should be held up as normative, no matter how well the kids turned out. If they turned out fine -- as they seem to have done -- then they beat the odds. Most kids emerging from that kind of broken family system will not be so lucky.
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MargaretE: Post Script:
My story was zero about suburbs. I neither grew up anywhere near a suburb. The neighborhood I diagramed of my youth is and was within walking distance of downtown Dallas, the 6th largest city in the USA. A very 'nice' and ideal of middle America...then and now. Of course my point is that ‘other persons’ lives’ are more often than not myths. As long as we have a standard that is concrete of what is and isn’t accepted as ‘right’ or ‘normative’…and with good reason… there will be per usual the ongoing betrayal of veracity; people’s lives in private vs. public truth.
I am sure you realized from reading my post that I was totally unaware of almost all of what I later learned. Meaning that I, like most of those I knew growing up apparently, thought everyone else had the 'normative' families whereas ours was somehow not 'normal' in the sense a child believes to be the desirable standard.
Hector, you misunderstand me. I'm not "railing" on adoptive parents. I think adoption is a splendid act of commitment and love, and I commend anyone who has the generosity and courage to do so. I was simply stating that I believe the biological bond is a powerful force that's not to be underestimated. I believe that most people, if given the choice, still prefer to procreate the old-fashioned way... because it's how we are made, and, on average, it works best. I don't understand why we can't talk honestly about these things without causing offense.
And Sharon, I'm certain you're right that most adoptive parents are very much capable of loving and providing for their children. I also believe that most suburban homes are not the cesspools of pedophilia and suicide that Rawlins describes above. But somehow, it's okay to brand all suburban families with that awful stereotype, but not okay to say that occasionally, an adoptive parent has a hard time bonding with the child... I don't get it?
I thought we were talking about best case scenarios, here... not condemning perfectly good situations that aren't totally ideal. Which is what most of us have.
Rawlins,
I never noticed, growing-up, how many of my friends stayed to dinner or stopped by around breakfast time to walk me to school. Today, I know why.
We keep a lot of myths going in the US, one of which is that of the perfect little family.
Time to grow up and look at just what things are really like. Much of the world the conservatives think is 'normal' is really a synthetic construction resulting from a generation which, having survived the great depression and WWII, were determined that their kids wouldn't go through what they went through.
Of course, thanks to the republicans, lots of kids today will have good reason to ask their great-grandparents what they did to survive the depression of the 1930's.
Re: Jon, what you say is true only if you believe there's no such thing as a biological, or "natural" connection between a parent and his/her child.
I do believe that. Here's a thought experiment: imagine your baby was switched at birth (it's actually happened, and yes, it's an ugly accident). Assuming the child looked reasonably like you (not a different race for example) would you know the difference? I don't believe there's a magical sixth sense embedded in our genes. We love our relatives because we know they are ours, even if they are not in fact genetically akin. This is obviously true in the case of spouses-- otherwise we would prefer to marry our siblings and cousins. For that matter, friendship with unrelated individuals would be impossible too if huamns did not form bonds between unrelated individuals. Deep down there are evoluntionary reasons for this. The nuclear family is fairly recent in history. For uncounted millennia we, and our hominid ancestors, lived not in families but in large bands. Yes, there was (probably) some sense of whose mate was whose, and whose children were whose, but the children were cared for by the entire group, especially after they were weaned, though even before it was not unusual for women to nurse babies not their own. In fact, this is not even a purely human trait: a famously unsocial species like housecats will show cross-nursing behavior in mothers. Genes really don't matter for much in personal relationships. Whoever you love is yours.
Re: risk of being abused by an adoptive parent is somewhat higher, but still very low.
???
Are you talking about situations where a child is adopted as an infant by both parents, or where the child is adopted by a step-parent. It is true that abuse is sonewhat higher in step-parent situations, I don't deny that (though it's far from universal even there) . But I have never heard of any study claiming that infant adoptions were at especial risk of abuse, beyond the norm. And when you consider some of the horrors perpetrated by dysfunctional (a polite word) parents on their own flesh and blood, I don't think any claim that biological parenting is superior can stand.
Tomorrow (Valentine's Day) is the 5th anniversary of my little skinny legal gay wedding, and on April 6th, we celebrate our 24th anniversary of being a couple.
It works for us, and no traditional families were harmed in the creation of my family - despite Rod's Sturm und Drang or anyone's attempt to stigmatize gay (or any other non-traditional) families.
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